Economics

There have been 3 completed talks and 3 topic suggestions tagged with economics.

There are many subfields of economics, including:

Related Tags

Completed Talks

Social Choice Functions

Delivered by Sidhant Saraogi on Wednesday November 8, 2017

Social choice functions help aggregate the opinions of many agents. Social choice problems arise in examples as varied as citizens voting in an election, committees deciding on alternatives, and independent computational agents making collective decisions. We aim to study social choice theory through the lens of boolean functions, and study concepts such as influence and noise stability, which provide analogues for natural concepts in the study of social choice. We will finish off by looking at the famous Arrow’s Theorem often popularly stated as “the only voting method that isn't flawed is a dictatorship”.

Game Theory (Part 2): Extensive Form Finite and Infinite Games

Delivered by Koosha Totonchi on Friday January 20, 2017

An extensive form game, unlike a regular one-shot-game, has the element of sequential or repeated movement. Chess for example, is an extensive form game. However, we will see that our mathematical definition of “game” will be much broader, so models we construct can be applied to problems in economics, computer science, and engineering—not just chess.

We will explore what it means to “solve” a game where players make back to back moves. We will also go over games where players pick their moves at the same time but play over and over. There will be a review of basic definitions from Game Theory Part 1, and we will introduce some new terms which will help us with extensive forms.

At the end, we can hopefully look at some interesting applications.

Note: this builds on the first Game Theory talk given in Fall 2016. If you need to review important concepts or you couldn’t attend, a webpage with definitions and basic information is available here. We’ll do a brief review so don’t worry too much! If you didn’t come to the first session, you should be able to understand everything here regardless.

Game Theory (Part 1)

Delivered by Koosha Totonchi on Friday November 4, 2016

A game is a “mathematical model between interacting decision makers” where each player must make choices based on a set of rules. Every individual in a game must also have a preferred reaction to any combination of actions taken by other agents. Game theory is about the study and application of these models. It involves various solution concepts and methods that can be employed to predict the outcomes of strategic engagements. This talk will introduce the major ideas in the field. There will be a focus on basic definitions, types of games, and how we can “solve games” using the Nash equilibrium. Hopefully we’ll get to “play” some ourselves. Towards the end, we can also review some neat unsolved problems in game theory that are very easy to understand, but prove really difficult to solve.

A summary of this talk is available here.